Advocates for books that matter.

David Brion Davis

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2014

“Less a political historian than a moral philosopher . . . his analysis . . . is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious . . . Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn’t inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past.” —Brenda Wineapple, The New York Times Book Review

“With this book, David Brion Davis brings to a conclusion one of the towering achievements of historical scholarship of the past half-century. . . . Davis is fully aware of the moral ambiguities involved in the crusade against slavery, the process of abolition and the long afterlife of racism. Nonetheless, in a rebuke to those historians today who belittle the entire project of emancipation, he insists that the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere was one of the profoundest achievements in human history, ‘a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget.’ His monumental three-volume study helps to ensure that it will always be remembered.” —Eric Foner, The Nation

“Davis has spent a lifetime contemplating the worst of humanity and the best of humanity—the terrible cruelty and injustice of slavery, perpetuated over centuries and across borders and oceans, overturned at last because of ideas and ideals given substance through human action and human agency. He concludes his trilogy by contemplating whether the abolition of slavery might serve as precedent or model for other acts of moral grandeur. His optimism is guarded. ‘Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate.’ Davis does, after all, describe the narrative of emancipation to which he has devoted his professional life as ‘astonishing.’ But even in his amazement, he has written an inspiring story of possibility. ‘An astonishing historical achievement really matters.’ And so does its history.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, The New York Review of Books

“In the years since The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Mr. Davis has published nine books, including Inhuman Bondage (2006), a synthesis of the rise and fall of New World slavery. . . . His former students can be found at virtually every major research institution in America, in disciplines ranging from law and literature to history, political science and public health. Now, almost 50 years after the first volume appeared, Mr. Davis concludes his trilogy with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. A brilliant capstone, the book extends Mr. Davis’s story still further—to encompass the growing anti-slavery agitation in 19th-century America and the efforts of free blacks to urge forward the cause of abolition and equality even as the forces of reaction sought to protect the status quo. Like its predecessors, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is deeply researched and possesses great narrative power.” —John Stauffer, Wall Street Journal